Kierkegaard Books: Essential Reading Guide for Beginners (2026)
What Søren Kierkegaard wrote in the nineteenth century speaks to the questions that still define our lives: anxiety, identity, faith, and the search for meaning. Among the essential Kierkegaard books, the ones that endure are those where he staged these questions most dramatically. The Danish philosopher published most of his major works in a single astonishing decade (the 1840s) under a constellation of pseudonyms, each voicing a different philosophical position on how to live.
The essential Kierkegaard books are Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, The Concept of Anxiety, and The Sickness Unto Death. Start with Fear and Trembling for a short, dramatic entry point, or Either/Or for the full philosophical experience. Secondary texts like Clare Carlisle’s Philosopher of the Heart offer an accessible biographical route in, and illustrated graphic guides provide a visual alternative.
I recommend following a reading path that takes you through what Kierkegaard considered the three stages of human existence: aesthetic, ethical, and religious. This framework provides the clearest lens for understanding how his philosophy builds, from the surface pleasures of aesthetic life to the depths of religious commitment. But before diving into the stages, a practical question: which book do you actually pick up first?
Where to Start with Kierkegaard
Two books compete for the title of best starting point, and each makes a legitimate case.
Fear and Trembling (1843) is the shorter, more dramatic option. Written under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, it meditates on a single biblical story (Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac) and extracts from it a radical philosophical claim about faith, ethics, and the limits of reason. You can read it in an afternoon. Its emotional force hits immediately, even if its philosophical implications take longer to unfold. For most readers, this is where I’d say to begin.
Either/Or (1843) is the ambitious alternative. At roughly 800 pages, it’s Kierkegaard’s most comprehensive work. A philosophical novel in everything but name, structured as papers supposedly found in a desk drawer. The first volume gives voice to an aesthete consumed by boredom, seduction, and romantic despair. The second belongs to Judge William, who argues for ethical commitment.
If neither appeals as a cold start, The Essential Kierkegaard (the Hong and Hong anthology from Princeton University Press) lets you sample across the full range before committing to a single work. It’s the most comprehensive English-language collection of his writing, and it serves particularly well readers who want to understand how Kierkegaard’s ideas sit within the broader existentialist tradition. Visual learners might also consider the graphic guides discussed later in this article.
The Core Works: Kierkegaard’s Three Stages of Existence
What connects Kierkegaard’s books is his framework of three existential stages. Each stage represents a way of living, a mode of relating to yourself and the world. The aesthetic, the ethical, the religious. His major works map onto these stages, and reading them in this order reveals how his thought builds.
This structure is also what connects Kierkegaard to the existentialists who followed, from Sartre’s essential works to Camus and Beauvoir, each responding to the questions Kierkegaard posed first.
The Aesthetic Stage—Either/Or
The aesthetic stage is life lived for experience, sensation, and intellectual stimulation. Kierkegaard’s aesthete (the anonymous “A” whose papers fill the first volume of Either/Or) is brilliant, witty, and ultimately desperate. In these papers, boredom becomes a philosophical condition, a seducer’s diary reads like a novel, and an evening at the opera yields metaphysics from Mozart.
The second volume answers with Judge William’s letters, arguing that choosing commitment (marriage, vocation, ethical responsibility) doesn’t diminish life but deepens it. The judge doesn’t dismiss the aesthetic; he argues you can only truly enjoy beauty once you’ve chosen a framework of meaning around it.
What makes Either/Or remarkable is that Kierkegaard doesn’t resolve the argument. He stages it. Two voices, two worldviews, no authorial verdict. The reader must choose, which is precisely Kierkegaard’s point.
The Ethical Leap—Fear and Trembling
If Either/Or stages the conflict between aesthetic and ethical life, Fear and Trembling shatters both by introducing something beyond them. It asks a question that philosophy has never satisfactorily answered, and that resonates far beyond the nineteenth century: can faith demand what ethics forbids? In an era when religious conviction increasingly collides with secular moral frameworks, the question feels less abstract than ever.
Abraham is commanded to sacrifice his son. He obeys. He doesn’t argue, doesn’t negotiate, doesn’t explain. Johannes de Silentio (Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous narrator) circles this act obsessively, trying to understand what Abraham knew that we don’t.
The concept that emerges is the “knight of faith”: someone who makes the leap beyond rational justification and lives, impossibly, in both resignation and hope simultaneously. It’s one of the most compelling figures in the history of philosophy. Whether you find Abraham monstrous or heroic says something about where you stand with Kierkegaard.
The Religious Stage—The Sickness Unto Death and The Concept of Anxiety
Kierkegaard’s two deepest works share a preoccupation: what goes wrong inside a person when they fail to confront existence honestly.
The Concept of Anxiety (1844) examines what Kierkegaard calls Angest: not fear of a specific threat, but the dizziness of freedom itself. You stand before your own possibilities and feel vertigo. This is the idea that would later travel through Heidegger and into the existentialist mainstream, influencing thinkers who shaped the existential questions that still preoccupy us. Kierkegaard saw it first: anxiety is not a symptom to be treated. It’s the price of being free.
The Sickness Unto Death (1849) takes the argument further. Its subject is despair; not the dramatic, wailing kind, but the quiet despair of not becoming yourself. You can despair by refusing to be who you are. You can despair by insisting on being a self you’ve invented. Both are forms of what Kierkegaard calls “the sickness unto death,” a spiritual condition deeper than depression, rooted in the self’s broken relationship with itself.
Together, these two books form Kierkegaard’s most sustained exploration of what it means to be human. They’re difficult (particularly The Concept of Anxiety, which layers philosophical arguments over theological frameworks in ways that demand slow reading). But they reward persistence.
From My Studio
Kierkegaard spent his life circling one question: what does it mean to truly exist? I made a short comic exploring that same territory. What Is Life All About? is a 15-page work in the same style as my Eisner-nominated graphic novel The Labyrinth—philosophy’s ultimate question made visual and entertaining. Get it free here.
Kierkegaard in Visual Philosophy—Comics Meet the Father of Existentialism
Some philosophers attract comics creators; others don’t. Sartre has The Labyrinth. Nietzsche has multiple graphic treatments. But Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism, remains remarkably underserved by sequential art.
The most substantial visual treatment is Introducing Kierkegaard: A Graphic Guide by Dave Robinson and Oscar Zárate (Icon Books, 2013), 176 pages mixing comic-style panels with explanatory text. What lifts it above a typical educational book is Zárate himself. The Argentine-born artist, who won the Will Eisner Prize for A Small Killing with Alan Moore, brings genuine visual storytelling to what could have been a dry format. Before this guide came Kierkegaard for Beginners by Donald D. Palmer (Writers and Readers, 1996), a more text-heavy illustrated overview mixing caricature with accessible exposition.
Art historians trace a lineage from Kierkegaard’s Angest through Scandinavian existential anxiety to Edvard Munch’s paintings. Steffen Kverneland’s graphic biography Munch (SelfMadeHero, 2016) tells the painter’s life story rather than tracing his philosophical debts, but the cultural connection is real and it’s a fascinating graphic novel.
As someone who translates philosophy into visual form, I find the irony striking. Kierkegaard wrote under pseudonyms (Johannes de Silentio, Anti-Climacus, Victor Eremita), each embodying a distinct philosophical position. His “indirect communication” is itself a kind of sequential storytelling: voices in dialogue, perspectives staged rather than stated. Of all the great philosophers, his literary approach is closest to what comics do naturally. Yet no graphic novel has dramatized his philosophy. It’s a gap in the broader philosophy comics tradition that I hope someone, someday, will fill.
The Best Secondary Books on Kierkegaard
Not everyone wants to start with the primary texts, and there’s no shame in that. Kierkegaard’s prose, even in excellent translations, can be labyrinthine. These secondary works provide entry points of their own.
Clare Carlisle’s Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (2019) is the biography to read. Carlisle, a Kierkegaard scholar at King’s College London, weaves philosophical exposition into biographical narrative, making Kierkegaard’s ideas inseparable from the life that produced them. His broken engagement to Regine Olsen, his public feud with the satirical newspaper The Corsair, his late attack on the Danish Church, all become occasions for philosophical insight. If you read one book about Kierkegaard, make it this one.
The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, edited by Alastair Hannay and Gordon Marino, is the academic reference. Sixteen essays by international scholars covering existence, faith, aesthetics, ethics, anxiety, and despair. Dense but invaluable if you’re studying Kierkegaard seriously.
For something shorter, Stephen Backhouse’s Kierkegaard: A Single Life (2016) offers a compact, readable biography that prioritizes storytelling over scholarly detail.
How to Read Kierkegaard — A Practical Reading Order
Here’s the path I’d suggest:
1. Fear and Trembling—Short, gripping, philosophically radical. Sets the stakes.
2. Either/Or—Now that you know what Kierkegaard is capable of, the longer work rewards patience. Read at least Volume I.
3. The Concept of Anxiety — The philosophical depth increases. Take it slowly.
4. The Sickness Unto Death—Kierkegaard’s most psychologically penetrating work.
An alternative route: begin with a secondary text (Carlisle’s Philosopher of the Heart or Zárate’s graphic guide) then move to the primary works. This gives you biographical and conceptual scaffolding before encountering Kierkegaard’s own voice.
One piece of advice that applies to all Kierkegaard readings: take the pseudonyms seriously. When Johannes de Silentio tells you he cannot understand Abraham, that’s not Kierkegaard being coy. It’s a deliberately constructed perspective, a character who means what he says. Kierkegaard called it indirect communication. Each pseudonym voices a position; none is simply Kierkegaard’s own. Read them as you’d read characters in a novel, and the books open up. That spirit of inhabiting perspectives without resolving them is what links Kierkegaard to the absurdist alternative that later philosophers developed when they encountered these same questions without his faith.
Kierkegaard believed that the most important truths can’t be communicated directly. They have to be lived into. His books are designed that way. They don’t hand you conclusions. They stage encounters and leave you to decide. Which is, in the end, the most Kierkegaardian thing a reading guide can say: the choice of where to begin is already a philosophical act.
Originally published 15 June 2026
By Ben Argon, philosophy comics creator and author of the Eisner-nominated graphic novel The Labyrinth, exploring the intersection of comics, philosophy, and visual storytelling.
